What do I focus on this summer?
I have 4 main tasks that I have this summer but I don’t know if I’m allocating the right amount of time into them and I’d like some help on figuring out what to prioritise.
Before we get into them, I want to list my goals this summer to motivate the 4 tasks I came up with (from most to least important).
- Get a return offer - pretty self-explanatory. It’ll take a lot of stress off this next job-searching season. I'm working at a small startup and amongst all early-mid stage startups, I’d probably take this one over them (assuming pay is around equal). With that being said, I’d much much rather be in big tech, which leads me to…
- Be interview and resume ready for the upcoming season. I think this decomposes into 2 parts
- Have very strong resume points about what I did. My project has reasonable scope and I think I can push to expand scope. Not sure if a recruiter cares about impact though. (Especially for new grads), would appreciate any insight on this (e.g, would a recruiter really care if you built a fully distributed KV store that helps the company store terabytes of data/day vs building a simple CRUD app)
- Be interview ready. Grinding Leetcode right now and I feel like I have a long way to go. On a good day I can pass a phone screen but I have trouble with on-sites.
- Have research output for grad school - I’m in a grad program right now and I need to do work for the summer. During the Fall I have another research internship lined up with a well-known company (wouldn’t really call it big tech though). Part of this internship is showing my supervisor that I can handle the load of doing research while maintaining internship responsibilities. I also need to finish up my thesis.
- Personal project - I run a startup and I have a few big corporations reach out for a trial. Product is mostly built so mostly the work is talking to customers and fixing bugs
Discussion
(6 comments)- 1
3 months agonew gradFor your startup idea, how did you reach out to those big corporations?
- 03 months agoSoftware Engineering Intern [OP]Taro Community
I cold emailed them
- 03 months agoSoftware Engineering Intern [OP]Taro Community
My end goal is to get a job I’m happy with by the time I graduate (big tech/large company). The goals are just guiding forces to help me achieve that goal.
As a result, here are the 4 respective tasks needed to accomplish my goals,
Task
Hours spent
Internship
45
Leetcode
20
Research
20
Personal Project
10
The issue is that I really want to put more effort into all of them, but there are only 168 hours (realistically 112 if you factor sleep) in a week and I need to be selective. The issue is I don’t know what to trade off and what to focus more on. Would really appreciate anyone to provide insight on what I can place more importance on on what I can place less importance on. Thanks
- 0
3 months agoFounding ML Engineer @ Lancey (YC S22)I think the limiting factor is quality not quantity -- when taking on so many different tasks I find that my quality starts taking a hit. So I suggest prioritizing by stack ranking whats the most important and keeping focus blocks (8-9 hours a day) and doing whatever you can in that block instead of throwing more hours at the problem
Are you getting interviews? If yes then do leetcode instead of project. No? focus on projects
But for the most part I suggest prioritizing getting that return offer, then the research perhaps on the weekend. If you have spare time do some leetcode
I find that when I spread myself too thin I dont get anything done and instead just prioritizing and doing fewer things properly gives me better results in the long run
- 03 months agoSoftware Engineering Intern [OP]Taro Community
Thanks for the insight. Unfortunately the project I'm working on is with a group, so it's not like I can fully give up on it (least I can put in is like 5 hours).
The issue I'm having right now is that 3 of the 4 things (research, internship and project) all have stakeholders (my research advisor, manager and teammates), and the only parameter I can sacrifice is leetcode.
With leetcode, at least from what a previous speaker on Taro said, you need at least 20 hours to dedicate weekly to see actual results. I'm already doing the bare minimum, and if I sacrifice more then I might as well not be doing leetcode. But if I'm not doing leetcode then recruiting season this fall will be super rough.
Regarding your question on getting interviews. I'm getting interviews but I'm not happy with my resume screen pass rate. This past season it was 5% with a sample size of around 150. I'm not happy with my interview performance either (I can pass a phone screen on a good day and if they don't ask anything hard). From these interviews I got two offers. Maybe I can get your thoughts on whether these metrics are "good".
I think the issue is that this is a super constrained optimization problem and it's not clear what ratio would yield the best results.
- 03 months agoFounding ML Engineer @ Lancey (YC S22)
First, a 5% pass rate is actually really really good which tells me you have a really strong profile so congrats on that. Given that I think your focus should then be on converting interviews to offers.
Most students (myself included) see a 1-2% pass rate and its even worse in this market and typically people apply to ~300-500 jobs per cycle
I would then try and do it this way
9-6 internship, 30-60 mins/day leetcode. Weekends research/leetcode/project
While I know the video youre talking about with LC 20hrs/week, I personally think with leetcode you go really far with even just a bit every day. The good thing about leetcode is that you dont need long focus periods (like research) as you can tackle a problem quickly and move on
Even if you do 1 problem a day by the time interviews start rolling (which tends to be before thanksgiving generally) youll have done 90-100 problems which should be pretty solid
